Introduction to SEM: Search Engine Marketing

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing is a Digital Marketing strategy to promote your website, product, and services on the search engine. It can be organic or paid marketing, depends upon your digital marketing strategy. 

You can use SEO for Organic Marketing and SEM for paid marketing. SEM marketing gives you a great opportunity to grow your business through online advertising on the search engine. 

SEO and SEM marketing is an integral part of Digital Marketing. The most common type of SEM is paid marketing or paid advertisements, which is called Pay-Per-Click.

Digital Guide 101 - What is SEM

SEM helps you to drive relevant traffic to your website using paid advertising. It is a very useful tool for new and small companies to promote their business and create brand awareness about their business on the search engine. 

It allows you to target your customers based on their interests and behavior. You can use different search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, for the marketing and advertising of your website. Google search engine marketing is the most commonly used search engine marketing platform.

Digital Guide 101 - SEO and PPC

Components of Search Engine Marketing:

Search Engine Optimization: SEO is a technique that helps you to get a higher rank in the organic searches on search engine results. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It means optimizing the website to get a higher ranking in the search engine results.

SEO has three major part which are:
1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO
3. Technical SEO

SEO marketing makes your website more visible to the customers who are looking for your products and services in the search engine result. That means it also helps you to get more relevant traffic, leads, sales, and more revenue for your business.

Pay-Per-Click: PPC is a paid search engine marketing tool, which drives traffic to your website from the search engine by showing your ad in the top results. You can make your ad campaign and advertise on the search engine. You need to pay a fee each time when someone clicks on your ad.

The three major types of Pay-Per-Click ads are:
1. Search Ads
2. Display Ads
3. Shopping Ads

PPC search engine marketing allows you to target your customers based on their interests and specific keywords that the customers are using in their searches. Some of the common platforms for PPC are Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Yahoo Ads.

Digital Guide 101 - Google Ads Quality Score


Key factors for SEM:

Keyword Research: Keyword research is the most common step in SEO and SEM. It is very important for both SEM and SEO. The whole success of the SEO and PPC is depended upon the quality of keyword research you do. Because these keywords are the searches that your target audience is using to search on the search engine. Keyword research is also very important for content optimization of your website.

Keyword Planning: Keyword planning means which types of keywords you are going to use in your ad. The main types of the keyword in Google Ads are:
1. Broad Match = Keyword
2. Modified Broad Match = +Keyword
3. Phrase Match = “Keyword”
4. Exact Match = { Keyword }

Campaign Planning: Campaign planning means preparing the advertisement campaign for your product and services on platforms like Google Ads. Campaign planning includes networks on which ad will appear, your budget for the ad, languages of your ad, in which locations your ad will appear and on which time & day your ad will schedule.

Quality Score of Ad: Quality Score is the total score of the quality of your ad, which means you have created a user-friendly ad that will be relevant for your target audience. It is also one of the most important factors for your paid advertising in the search engine, especially in PPC. Because your ad will get a higher rank in the search results only if the quality score of your ad is higher than your competitors. 
The components of Quality Score are:
1. Click Through Rate
2. Relevancy of your Ad
3. Landing Page Quality

Digital Guide 101 - Benefits of SEM


Why is Search Engine Marketing important?

Increases Brand Awareness: SEM can increase your brand awareness. It shows your website, product, and services in the top searches. SEM ads are only visible to the people who searched for your product and services or used keywords related to your business. It makes your website visible in the top results and even if the customer does not buy anything. It still increases your brand awareness.

Targeted Marketing: SEM gives you the option to target your customers based on multiple factors like: Demographics – age, gender, and education or Geography – location & place. Some of the other factors are devices, actions, and searches of your customers. It makes your target audience more specific as per your requirement. Thus, you can use targeted marketing for your customers.

Better Targeting: When you use PPC it helps you to target “in the market audience”, who are looking for the product or service you are offering. In-market audience means people who are searching for specific items that they wanted to buy. PPC makes sure that your ad should appear in the search results when people search for your selected keywords. It helps you in better targeting with the in-market audiences.

Better Return on Investment: SEM gives you a better Return on Investment because it targets specific customers who are interested in your product or services. And, it also gives you the real-time data of your customers that help you to understand the interest and likings of your target audience. SEM is much better than traditional advertising because most people today use smartphones and the internet than any other gadget.

More Conversions: SEM helps you to get more conversions. It shows your ad in the top results that your target audience can easily find. Almost 33% of the people click on the ads that they find in the top results. The conversions from SEM could be an online purchase, lead generation, newsletter subscription, and social media following.




Final words:

SEM is a very important part of Digital Marketing. It helps you to promote your products on the search engine. It has two major parts Search Engine Optimization and Paid Marketing also called PPC. You can use SEM for organic or paid marketing of your business depends upon your digital marketing strategy.

Online advertising on search engine also allows you to reach your potential customers because they are using multiple devices – desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. It shows the importance of SEM in Digital Marketing. Thus, SEM is a great way to promote your business on Search Engines and to reach your potential customers who are interested in your product and services.


By: Abhishek Panwar

Subscribe and Like – Digital Creative Mind – for more updates about Digital Marketing.
Share your valuable comments for better updates.

Comments